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Towards Transformative
Social Interventions
Comment on
a Chapter by
Geoffrey Nelson and Isaac Prilleltensky
Dennis Fox
2005
Geoffrey
Nelson and Isaac Prilleltensky's new book, Community Psychology:
In Pursuit of Liberation and Well-being (New York: Palgrave Macmillan),
incorporates
invited commentaries on individual chapters, including mine on their
chapter
about Social Interventions. A preliminary
draft of the book is available on line.
I've worked
with Isaac Prilleltensky for more than a decade. Together we co-founded
RadPsyNet and co-edited Critical
Psychology: An Introduction. We don't agree about everything, but
it's been a pleasure working together. See more
of his work.
The most useful contribution of this useful
chapter on Social Interventions is its discussion of dilemmas facing community
psychologists who work within governmental agencies, nongovernmental organizations,
and social movement organizations. Too often, recruiters of all stripes
make one-sided appeals urging students to use their skills to further
one project or another, without emphasizing the difficulties inherent
in any such effort. As Geoffrey Nelson and Isaac Prilleltensky point out,
every choice forces one to navigate through difficult circumstances, leading
to both hope and despair.
Citizens who remain hopeful but skeptical of entreaties to enlist can
better contemplate the pros and cons of different forms of action. Those
determined to spend a lifetime fostering social change and advancing social
justice must determine for themselves how to retain their motivation beyond
the exciting cause of the moment. Burn-out is a serious problem for movement
activists, and even for many in more traditional government and NGO settings.
My own biases from within the United States make me especially skeptical
of efforts to work as an insider within government. Nelson and Prilleltensky
share this bias; even as they point to important examples of using one's
position within government to advance socially useful work, they remind
us that bandaid solutions don't go nearly far enough and that government
is by nature conservative. Yet, perhaps reflecting their own dilemma posed
by seeking to guide students in useful yet practical directions, they
find more encouragement than I could summon about the prospects for justice-focused
government work. As someone critical of government's role in maintaining
rather than opposing injustice, I urge students to contemplate this route
with careful deliberation.
Although it is sometimes possible to do useful work inside the belly
of the beast, and although government involvement may seem necessary to
sustain comprehensive social interventions aimed at changing "values,
policies, programs, distribution of resources, power differentials and
cultural norms" (p. ), pressure to avoid challenging the underlying
system -- as Nelson and Prilleltensky point out -- is often overwhelming.
Too often, rather than opposing globalization and other elite-driven corporate
programs designed to reshape the world to meet corporate needs, governments
serve those same corporate interests. Too often, government efforts aim
to dampen popular support for change by supplying the appearance of justice
rather than the reality (Fox, 1999). Even the tools we think will help
us transform society often turn out to be less adequate than we had hoped,
a state of affairs Isaac Prilleltensky's son Matan might discover if he
indeed pursues public interest law. A bulwark of state control, law more
often inhibits social change than advances it (Fox, 1993b, 1999; see law
schools explicitly focused on justice.)
Thus, although Nelson and Prilleltensky note the risk of co-optation
for those who work in social movement organizations, the risk is even
greater for those in government, where lifetime careers can be destroyed
if one pushes the boundaries too far and where the attractions of climbing
a career ladder "inside the loop" frequently dampen reformist
zeal. Change advocates inside government too often find themselves settling
for policies that, while tolerable or even humane, have little transformative
potential. So although I appreciate the chapter's optimism about using
government against itself, and although I'd rather have government agencies
filled with reformers than automatons, more attention should be paid to
bureaucratic imperatives that make transformative efforts unlikely to
succeed. In my view, not every project that's socially useful leads to
useful social change.
There are three additional problems with government efforts to ameliorate
social problems -- the first, somewhat ironically, with efforts
that actually provide needed services. Community psychologist Seymour
Sarason (1976) warned almost three decades ago that programs advanced
by modern centralized states often damage two important values congruent
with those advanced by Nelson and Prilleltensky: personal autonomy and
psychological sense of community. Because the impetus for change comes
from outside, community members direct their attention and expectations
to external authorities rather than to themselves and their peers; this
fosters dependency and apathy rather than liberation and participation.
In this sense, thus, there's another dilemma for those who work inside
government: how to provide services and meet important needs while also
enhancing, rather than inhibiting, people's ability to work with others.
Sarason urged community psychologists to pay more attention to this "anarchist
insight," and indeed community psychologists should find much of
interest in anarchist suspicion of centralized authority (Fox, 1985, 1993a).
Second, emphasizing the kinds of social change possible within
traditional governments and advanced by traditionally pragmatic policy-oriented
NGOs can lead to an unnecessarily restricted vision of what transformative
change might mean. For example, in the top half of Table 8.1, the "insider"
goals identified as transformative (progressive taxation, universal health
insurance, and the like) are designed to make our current system more
bearable (more fair and less destructive), not to replace the system with
a fundamentally different one. If accomplished, this would ease injustice
and make life measurably better. But it would also leave intact the underlying
system of corporate and state power.
The third problem with government work is that emphasizing program
evaluation and similar roles identified by Nelson and Prilleltensky as
key to instigating change leads to an exaggerated belief that injustice
exists because of bad data rather than elite power. Demonstrating to authorities,
for example, that inequality leads to ill health is unlikely to persuade
them to create an egalitarian society. Although more data always seems
useful, the lack of data is rarely the most crucial barrier to resolving
our most serious societal problems (Fox, 1991). Data gathering and dissemination
is necessary for effective amelioration, but we shouldn't expect it to
lead to transformation unless government authorities have first been forced
to embrace transformation for other, more political, reasons.
So what's a budding transformational community psychologist to do?
If community psychology is -- or is trying to be -- a psychology of liberation,
then we have to confront government as well as other sources of injustice.
Governments do react to pressure for change, but rarely generate their
own. It's our job to help create that pressure. Thus, social movement
organizations of the kind Nelson and Prilleltensky describe are crucial
for building strains to the boiling point, at which time government is
more likely to respond, regardless of whether its agencies are filled
with reformers or automatons. One dilemma is how to do that effectively
and honestly, without overwhelming our audience, burning ourselves out,
or accepting invitations to become rock-no-boat insiders beholden to governments
or large nongovernmental funding sources.
Fortunately, social movement activists have generated a large literature
on how to analyze the sources of oppression and injustice, mobilize resources,
raise consciousness, and in many other ways work more effectively. In
addition to the sources cited in the chapter, especially useful is the
pamphlet Principles for Promoting
Social Change (undated) written by peace psychologist Neil Wollman
and others and published by the Society for the Psychological Study of
Social Issues, a long-established organization of liberal activist psychologists.
Wollman and others also have useful material on the website of RadPsyNet:
The Radical Psychology Network. Isaac Prilleltensky and I co-founded
this international network in 1993 to foster beneficial interaction among
psychologists and psychology students who want to make transformational
change a reality.
Nelson and Prilleltensky remind us that successful social movements have
altered the course of history. Indeed, government endorsement of social
interventions most often comes in response to persistent popular pressure.
Fortunately, working toward building that pressure often provides movement
participants with the satisfaction of doing the right thing while also
enabling them to meet others with similar values, share their useful skills
and learn new ones, and build a values-based life. Although we should
keep in mind the potential drawbacks of movement work the authors note
-- internal contradictions, insularity, narrowed focus and the like --
modern movement organizations are increasingly open to acknowledging and
dealing with such drawbacks. Helping overcome them may be the most significant
role for community psychologists who want to bring about a more just world.
up to top
References
Fox, D. R. (1985). Psychology, ideology, utopia,
and the commons. American Psychologist, 40, 48-58.
Fox, D. R. (1991). Social science's limited
role in resolving psycholegal social problems. Journal of Offender
Rehabilitation, 17, 117-124.
Fox, D. R. (1993a). The autonomy-community balance
and the equity-law distinction: Anarchy's task for psychological jurisprudence.
Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 11, 97-109.
Fox, D. R. (1993b). Psychological jurisprudence
and radical social change. American Psychologist, 48, 234-241.
Fox, D. R. (1999). Psycholegal scholarship's
contribution to false consciousness about injustice. Law and Human
Behavior, 23, 9-30.
Nelson, G., & Prilleltensky, I. (2003). Community
psychology: In pursuit of liberation and well-being. London: MacMillan.
Sarason, S. B. (1976). Community psychology and the anarchist insight.
American Journal of Community Psychology, 4, 243-261.
Wollman, N., Lobenstine, M., Foderaro, M. & Stose, S. (undated).
Principles for promoting
social change: Effective strategies for influencing attitudes
and behaviors. Washington, DC: Society for the Psychological Study
of Social Issues.
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